The Press: New Tonic for the Trib

After the family scuffle that kicked the New York Herald Tribune’s President Whitelaw Reid upstairs in 1955, younger brother Ogden (“Brownie”) Reid took over the ailing paper with the titles of president, publisher and editor. Brownie Reid, Yale ’49, brought with him a $2,250,000 insurance company loan on the 20-story Herald Tribune Building in midtown Manhattan (41st Street) and an ambitious two-year plan for a “lighter, brighter” Trib.

For the reliable, respectable Republican Herald Tribune, longtime morning rival of the good, grey and sometimes Democratic New York Times (circ. 623,000), Publisher Reid, then 29, confidently prescribed such bitter potions as brassy circulation-building contests and a mint-green third news section. He cut down on serious news coverage in order to trowel crime and cheesecake across Page One, souped up the gossip columns and, in fact, gave Broadway Gossipist (and onetime pressagent) Hy Gardner a powerful voice in the paper’s inner councils.

Soon thereafter the Trib became lighter—if not brighter—by the departure of a dozen disgruntled top Trib hands, among them City Editors Joseph Herzberg and Fendall Yerxa, Pulitzer Prize-winning Correspondent Homer Bigart (who went to the Times). The revamping job turned the paper into a vamp, neither Times nor tabloid—nor Trib. By then the smallest of Manhattan’s seven major dailies, the Herald Tribune earned the additional distinction of being the only morning paper that had a substantial weekday circulation drop: from a 1955 peak of 387,276 to 367,248 this year. And despite such costly come-ons as a handy pocket-size TV supplement (editor: Hy Gardner) and a staff-produced feature magazine, Sunday circulation slipped from 596,308 in early 1956 to 576,488 in 1957; since 1946 it had dropped 18%.

Newspaperman’s Newspaper. Last week, plainly in need of stronger medicine, the Herald Tribune was about to get the biggest pick-me-up in its 116-year history (all accompanied by the adjectival drumbeating of Tex McCrary Inc., the radio-TV performer’s public-relations outfit). Though it has owned the paper outright ever since Brownie’s grandfather Whitelaw took over the old Tribune in 1872, the Reid family decided to reorganize its closed corporation as a Delaware stock company in order to bring in outside capital, lined up several potential investors. To London last week went Publisher Reid and Pressagent McCrary, for brass-tack talks with multimillionaire Republican John Hay (“Jock”) Whitney, U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s and lifelong friend of McCrary, who had already expressed interest in helping the paper (with a rumored transfusion of $2,000,000). To keep a sober eye on editorial policy under Editor-Publisher Reid, the paper was recruiting an advisory board composed of business and G.O.P. leaders.

With the promise of new capital came an assurance that the Herald Tribune would again cultivate its biggest asset: the tradition of serious, independent journalism that started with Founder Horace Greeley and under the late Publisher Ogden Reid Sr. earned the paper the reputation of being a newspaperman’s newspaper.* In support of this aim, the Trib plans to add up to 16 columns to its news space and put its emphasis on the first rather than the second half of Brownie Reid’s credo: “More News in Less Time.”

All That Glitters. In a flurry of new appointments and policy changes, the Herald Tribune announced that its editorial-page section, to be increased to two full pages daily and Sunday, will be headed by William J. Miller, 45, veteran of the Cleveland Press and TIME, onetime Nieman fellow at Harvard, and for the past three years an editorial writer for LIFE. To a new job called “News Development Editor,” with the task of applying newsmagazine techniques to daily reporting, went Arthur Twining Hadley II, Yale ’49, onetime (1950-56) staffer on Newsweek. Other additions: Society Gossipist Charles Ventura, longtime international-set reporter for the New York World-Telegram and Sun; Elmo Wilson’s World Poll, first globe-girdling opinion survey to appear in any U.S. daily; Newsweek Staffer Terry Ferrer as education editor.

The Herald Tribune already has one of Manhattan’s most readable sport sections, backstopped by literate Columnist Red Smith, a fine drama critic in Walter Kerr, plus a strong stable of pundits—Walter Lippmann, the Alsops, Roscoe Drummond, David Lawrence. Under Brownie Reid, the Trib has opened a Moscow bureau (cost: $75,000 a year), staffed by able B.J. Cutler. Under longtime Associated Press Correspondent Don (The FBI Story) Whitehead, its Washington bureau in the past two years has turned in many a solid reporting job, such as the series last year by Tom Lambert and Robert S. Bird on the inefficiency of military aircraft procurement policies.

The new Herald Tribune’s unknown quantity, to many staffers, is still Publisher Reid, a portentously high-minded young man who sincerely believes that “the Trib is one of the world’s most important papers”—yet must take the blame for much in the recent oast that has made it merely trivial. Even last week, as Tribmen spoke earnestly of their plans for a better paper, radio commercials and full-page ads for a new circulation-boosting Tangle Towns contest struck a dissonant note. Nevertheless, the decision to refinance and remold the Herald Tribune argued powerfully that young Brownie Reid has learned that all that glitters is not bright nor light.

*Among its newspapermen’s newspapermen: Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Nunnally Johnson, Franklin P. Adams, J. P. Marquand, Don Marquis, John O’Hara.